ALL ABOUT SACRAMENTO Rose Braz in conversation with Trevor Paglen

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When you first started going to Sacramento to do anti-prison work, what were some of your first impressions about the legislative process?

One thing that hits you over the head is how separate what goes on inside the halls of the capital is from what goes on in prisons. In many ways, they’re completely disconnected. Policies are passed without any reference to what the crime rate is or what the real problem is. The workings of the state are completely disconnected from the real issues that lead to crime and harm in communities, but also disconnected from what goes on behind prison walls. And yet, decisions made in Sacramento have huge effects on communities affected by imprisonment and behind prison walls. Laws are made and policies are passed without any basis in reality.

Incarceration is very abstract in Sacramento. For example, in the budget process, you’re dealing with line-items that don’t appear to mean anything, but these numbers dramatically affect people’s lives all over the state, from communities where prisoners come from, to places where prisons are built, to the lives of people in the inside. When the governor proposes taking away sack-lunches for prisoners, for example, the policy appears on a line-item as “operational efficiency.”

The State Capitol

Up until fairly recently, the issue of prisons and incarceration hasn’t been at the forefront of the legislative process. In the past year or so, prison activists have tried to make incarceration a central issue in the legislative process, and we’re starting to see some results from these efforts. Some of that comes from media pressure, some of it has to do with budget pressures and people looking at what kinds of state spending have not been cut. Right now, incarceration is much more of a news story, which means that it’s much more on legislators’ minds.

One of the most shocking things for me when we started attending hearings related to prisons, was that there was nobody speaking up to say that they should reduce the prison budget by reducing the number of people in prison. On the other side, there was the ever-present California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), the prison guards union, which gets up at every hearing and makes their interests known. In the past, Craig Brown (the CCPOA lobbyist) would simply get up, say “the CCPOA supports this” or “the CCPOA opposes this,” and then sit down. They didn’t have to explain or justify their position; they didn’t even have to say why they felt a certain way. All they had to say was what their position was. And that was often enough to sway the legislators. We, on the other hand, would get up and we’d have all kinds of numbers and positions and personal testimonies to try and counteract the CCPOA.

The CCPOA has really come onboard with a lot of scare tactics. One is that they’re sending their Vice President Lance Corcoran to all the hearings now instead of just their lobbyist and he is talking about how parole-reforms are putting dangerous people on the streets and that there’s going to be another Willie Horton any day. They’re resorting to these kinds of tactics because their pay-increases are under attack with the budget crisis. I can’t emphasize enough the power of the CCPOA. It’s not a major player in Sacramento; it’s the major player in Sacramento.

The CCPOA has several other incarnations. There are the victim’s groups that are founded and funded by the guards union. The main one is called the “Doris Tate” group. That group is, in my understanding, entirely funded by the CCPOA – they’re given money by the union and given space in the CCPOA headquarters to run their operation.

Current CCPOA Boss Mike Jimenez

The CCPOA takes out ads in the California Journal, a kind of magazine for legislators and government-types. The back cover of this newspaper often has CCPOA advertising. In a recent ad, they showed a bulletproof vest with duct-tape over it, implying that they have to use duct-tape on their vests because their budgets are being cut. This is, simply put, bullshit. But you can see what kind of presence they have. They recently bought over a million dollars in ad-time on television and radio to air their message. They’re showing a video called “Hard-Times” [insert picture of Hard Times] which is about how terrible their job is, how much danger they’re in, and how terrible the people in prison are. The point of these videos and ads is to scare people. It’s about trying to convince people that there’s no alternative to huge amounts of prison spending and huge numbers of people locked up.

Former CCPOA Boss Don Novey

When prison-spending was under scrutiny, Critical Resistance had proposals to reduce the budget by reducing the number of people in prison. The CCPOA had a proposal to reduce spending by reducing the number of their bosses, which are people who worked for the California Department of Corrections (CDC) who were not in the CCPOA. When legislators looked at the proposal, they thought the idea of firing all the prison guard’s bosses was ridiculous. It seemed like a big joke. But the CCPOA proposal ended up being, almost line-for-line, the agenda for an assembly hearing around prison spending. Our proposals never get this kind of attention. We have to get up at the public comment section of the hearing and try to edge our way into the conversation, but their proposals were actually line-item suggestions in the budget hearing. At the time, a guy named Rudy Bermudez, who is himself a member of the CCPOA, chaired the subcommittee dealing with prison spending. When you have those kinds of connections, your suggestions end up being the agenda.

Still from CCPOA Video "Hard Times"

I’m not really sure that there’s a good history of the CCPOA, there are a couple of articles here and there, but it’s a largely unwritten history. There are prison guards unions all over the country, but they have nowhere near the kind of influence that the CCPOA has. They started out as a small unit, and what they did was collect large union-dues from their membership. They used the money very strategically: they made campaign contributions to legislators. It got to the point where it is now, where the CCPOA is the greatest contributor to state legislative races. They give more than the teachers, more than the doctors, more than anyone.

Once they had given this money to politicians, they used their influence in two ways. First, they bargained for better contracts. But they also lobbied very strongly for harsher laws – they used the whole “get tough on crime” or “lock them up and throw away the key” mantra. These new laws and harsher sentences are responsible for the huge increase in the numbers of people in prison since the early 1980s. Remember, the tougher the laws are, the more prisoners you have. The more prisoners you have, the more guards you need. The more guards you have, the more dues the CCPOA collects. The more money the CCPOA has, the more campaign contributions they can make. It’s a vicious circle, because the prison guards become more powerful by trying to put more people in prison.

Assemblyman Rudy Bermudez (D-Norwalk), active CCPOA Member

The CCPOA is pretty small in terms of the number of members it has. There are about 39,000 people in the union, compared to something like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents over 500,000 Californians. The CCPOA is small in numbers, but they’ve used their money to push their political message with big results. They have a whole building in Sacramento with huge amounts of lawyers, lobbyists, and public relations people. It’s a giant place that’s completely dedicated to them.

In addition to the CCPOA, other interests in Sacramento include the California Department of Corrections (CDC) itself. If the CDC were really doing such a great job, they should be putting themselves out-of-business. What I mean is that they should measure their success by the number of people who don’t come back to prison. If they were doing a good job, they would be downsizing. Despite this, they’re always trying to protect themselves and expand their operations.

There’s also a private-prison lobby in Sacramento, but it’s pretty small thanks to the CCPOA. Private prisons don’t have unionized guards, so the CCPOA is against them. There’s a lobbyist for the private prisons, who very much wants to make alliances with people like us because we attack the CCPOA. They’re always telling us what a good job we’re doing and trying to shake our hands and so forth.

CCPOA Headquarters in West Sacramento

I’ve sat through enough hearings where legislators will do anything to appear “tough on crime.” We’ll be talking about parole reforms – really modest ones like whether someone should have to go back to prison if they miss a meeting with their parole officer – and someone will always say, “is this threatening public safety?” The vast majority of legislators will take any opportunity to appear “tough-on-crime.”

There are a few legislators who are trying to be what they call “smart-on-crime,” but they haven’t managed to make many significant reforms. We were meeting with an aid recently who told us “we agree with you completely, you’re preaching to the choir. Here’s what you need to do: you need to get Arnold to go on the Tonight Show and sell this to the public. That’s the only way this thing is going to move.” She was making a point about the kind of power you need to make real change.

The prison system is so huge, and politicians are so reluctant to do anything about it. Who benefits from all of this?

The CDC benefits as it grows and gets more power in state politics. The people who work in the prisons, who build the prisons, and who provide services to the prisons all benefit. The towns that host prisons believe that they’ll benefit from them, although it’s been proven that they don’t. Also, the CDC will sometimes cut deals with towns, saying in effect that “if you take this prison, then we’ll give you this new school.” More and more, medical services, food services, and transportation services around prisons are privatized and the people who provide those services benefit. A whole drug-treatment conglomerate benefits. Finally, there are a number of legislators who believe that they benefit from being “tough-on-crime.” It’s unclear to me that they really do benefit from it, but that seems to be the common perception.

From hanging around Sacramento and trying to understand how that system works, the yearly budget cycle seems to have a huge effect on how the state runs. Can you explain how the budget cycle works?

As the budget crisis has worsened, we at Critical Resistance have begun to look at the budget as a way for us to achieve some of our goals and priorities. Here’s the way that the budget cycle works in California. In January, the governor proposes a budget for the next year, and this budget comes out of the Department of Finance, which is appointed by the governor. They look at last year’s spending and propose some changes, and put a number on how much money the CDC should be allocated. That proposal then goes to two different subcommittees. One of them is in the Senate and the other is in the Assembly. In the Assembly, Budget Subcommittee 4 deals with the prison budget. And in the Senate, it’s Budget Subcommittee 2. They go through the budget and look at each item, some in more detail than others. Their staff makes recommendations, and so does the Legislative Analysts’ Office (the LAO is an independent government department that is supposed to look at these things from a non-political perspective). So the Budget Subcommittees have recommendations from the Governor, their staff, and from the LAO.

The Governor's Office

So, for example, with the Delano 2 prison, each of these entities will make a recommendation. Someone on the committee might say, “yes, let’s fund it” and another might say, “no, let’s not, let’s set its number at zero.” In their deliberations, the committee will make a decision about what proposal they want to take forward. For example, they’ll decide which position to take on the Delano 2 prison. Then the governor will issue what’s called a “May Revised Budget.” This is an updated version of the budget he proposed in January and might change according to new information about state finances, or a feeling that he’s gotten from the subcommittees. The subcommittees then compare their budget against the governor’s May Revised Budget, so the budget goes through the subcommittees twice.

At the end of this cycle, the Assembly and the Senate now have two different versions of the proposed corrections budget. Each subcommittee gives their recommendations to the full budget committee of their house. The full budget committee then takes all the recommendations from the subcommittees and puts them together as a complete budget. So now you have two different versions of the complete budget, one for each house. From there, the budgets go to a “conference committee.” The conference committee includes members of both the Assembly and the Senate. They go through the proposed budgets and look at where there are differences and they try to resolve them. They look at the Senate’s version of the budget, the Assembly’s version of the budget, the Governor’s version of the budget, and the LAO’s version of the budget. Whenever there’s a different amount, they’ll vote on which amount is going to be final. So, for example, if the Governor, Assembly, Senate, and LAO have different amounts for the Delano prison, the conference committee will vote on which version is going to be final. You can see that being on this conference committee is a very powerful position for a legislator. There are about seven people on this committee. They go for days and days and days on this committee. They literally sit there for days at a time, staying up until midnight day after day going from item to item and voting on the items that are different in the different versions.

Senate Hearing on Prisons

When they are finished, they take their proposal to the full Assembly and the full Senate for voting. All the legislators vote “yea” or “nay” on the budget, and when it’s approved, it goes to the governor for final approval. When the governor gets the budget, he has the power of a line-item-veto, which means that he can strike out any line or item that he doesn’t like.

Another thing related to this is what’s called “trailer-bills” and anyone can put a trailer onto an existing bill. Last year, for example, a lot of the reforms that were won in education came in the form of these trailer-bills. Trailer bills can specify how money is supposed to be used or changes to a budget are supposed to be met. For example, we might want to see a budget that would decrease the CDC’s funding by $400 million with a trailer-bill saying that they have to make these savings by reducing the number of people in prison by 10,000 people. These trailer-bills can have a large effect on policy because they can tell different agencies how they have to spend money or how they have to save money. In these ways, we can have some effect on policy through the budget process. It’s often easier to get something through the budget process than it is to get something done as a bill.

What are some of the other ways that policy gets affected besides the budget cycle?

Aside from the budget cycle, another way that policy gets created is through the normal legislative process. Criminal justice legislation outside the budget process first goes through the “public safety committees,” then has to go through an “appropriations committee,” before it gets voted on by the full house. If you want to propose a new piece of legislation, it has to make its way through a lot of different committees before it even comes up for a vote. There are all kinds of places where a bill can die.

For example, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has a bill to establish a Department of Education that is outside of the CDC. The idea is to take the control over education in prisons away from the CDC, and to make an independent agency responsible for it. The bill went successfully through the first committee. Then the bill went to the appropriations committee and they said, “wait a second, this is going to cost a huge amount of money.” The committee came up with some huge amount of money that they thought it would cost, and the bill got stuck there. That’s where it is right now. Criminal justice legislation goes through these committees before it goes anywhere.

The “three-strikes” law started out as a bill, but never got passed. It went through the system a bunch of times, but it was always killed in different committees because a few Democrats thought it was too harsh and wouldn’t support it. The California legislature is heavily Democratic. When the Polly Klass thing happened, they got “three-strikes” on the ballot, and the public directly voted for it.

The fourth way that you can influence policy is through the courts. The courts have a lot of say in the ways that they interpret the laws. By interpreting the laws in different ways, the courts can have huge effects on policy. For example, they can make decisions on what counts as a strike, and these decisions can influence policy.

I want to point out here that these are only some of the mechanisms that policy gets created through. These are ways to try and impact policy, and that's not the same thing as building a movement.

It’s not very controversial to say that the prison system is racist – that it affects people of color at a much higher rate. How does this factor into the kinds of things that go on in the state capitol?

California State Legislature

If you talk to legislators, they know that the system largely affects people of color, or poorer people, or people from certain areas. They know all of this. But whether knowing that is enough to make them raise objections to different laws or budget items is a different story. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard an objection to something involving prisons on this basis at all. Right now, there’s a bill to equalize the penalties for possession of cocaine with possession of crack. There’s all kinds of opposition to this bill, people saying “crack is a more dangerous drug” or that it’s “more associated with guns” or whatever. It’s a bunch of crap, and it’s a bunch of racist crap. They want to believe that the whole thing is fair, that if you did the crime you’ll do the time, and that it doesn’t matter where you come from or what your skin color is, or how much money you make per year.

The tough-on-crime legislation is largely driven by fear-mongering, and that’s all about racism, about making you fearful of the black man walking down the street or your neighbor. Racism underlies all of it. One of the things that the CCPOA does is to put out videos that very much play off of people’s racism.

In the past twenty-five years or so, we’ve also seen a huge increase in the number of women who are put in prison. The numbers of women in prison are still much smaller than men, but they’ve increased at a much faster rate.

The increase in the number of women in prison has a lot to do with the expansion of conspiracy laws around drug-dealing. If you are the spouse or the partner or the sister or the mother of a man who’s arrested for drug-dealing and you’ve had a conversation where you’ve said “he’ll pick you up in ten minutes” or something, they can claim that you’re a part of the conspiracy. If they say that you’re a part of the conspiracy, then you’re responsible for the same amount of drugs as the other members of the conspiracy, no matter how small your role may have been. We’ve also seen a move away from the “coddling” of prisoners of all kinds. In the past, if you were the mother of someone, or you were a woman that people were dependent on, then the judge might have factored that into the sentence. But that doesn't happen any more. Through things like mandatory minimums, power has been taken away from judges to do this sort of thing.

Would you say that Sacramento is a corrupt place? How much corruption to you think there is in the legislative process?

Would you say that Sacramento is a corrupt place? How much corruption to you think there is in the legislative process?

I would say that Sacramento is a completely corrupt place that does a very good job of not appearing corrupt. It’s corrupt in the sense that if you have the power to make big campaign contributions, then you have some power there. You have some power to get them to do what you want them to do. It sounds really cliché to say this and you’d think that it wouldn’t be so simple, but in many ways it actually is that simple.

If you want to have some power and you don’t have money for large campaign contributions, then you need to be able to turn out – literally – thousands of people to these hearings, and you need to be able to do this consistently. That’s another way, I think, that you can have some impact. If you can’t do either one of those, no matter how good your suggestions and ideas are, you are pretty powerless to impact public policy.

Having said that, I’ve also seen in the few short years that I’ve been up there, there are people who know us. And to one degree or another, there are some people who respect us, and I’ve seen that grow. Because of this, you might say that it’s less corrupt. I mean, who am I? I’m a person who doesn’t spend that much time in Sacramento and I’m working on an issue that there are not a lot of people lobbying around, and now we’re known. We’ve had legislative aids (who sometimes have more power than the people they work for) ask us what we’re going to push this year. It’s a little shocking to have these people ask us what we’re doing or what we’re working on, but they are. However, when it really comes down to shaping policy, it seems to me that if you don’t have that line of money, and you don’t have the power to turn out 7,000 people, for example, it’s much, much harder.

We’d been up there a number of times advocating as Critical Resistance and really were marginalized. Then we went up there in a coalition with the SEIU and were a little less marginalized. The first time that I got up, testified at a hearing, and said that I was a member of a coalition with the SEIU, Craig Brown from the CCPOA was there. This is a guy who never gets upset. Anyway, his face turned completely red and he got up there and said how “shocked” he was that his fellow union members would be “endangering the lives of CCPOA members by opposing the construction of the Delano prison.”

The reality of Sacramento is that if you want to get something done, you have to have someone with some power who will advocate for you. It isn’t enough to get just anyone. You have to have someone with some real power in the legislature. Someone in leadership in the party, or someone who is a chair on a committee, or someone who has a relationship to one of the caucuses and can get their fellow caucus-members on board and to prioritize your issue.

There are not a lot of grassroots activists testifying up in Sacramento at all. When that does happen, it’s good. I don’t think that we should spend all of our time there, but I do think that it’s good to have grassroots people there. Legislators almost never see that.